When Amanda Rowell set up her own gallery in Sydney, The Commercial, she refused to poach artists from blue chip Roslyn Oxley9, where she had worked as gallery manager for over a decade. It was 2012, and her clear-eyed decision set the tone for what was to become one of the most highly regarded galleries in town. ʻWhen the rumor got out that I was going to be leaving Roslynʼs and opening a gallery, I would often get asked, “Is it going to be a commercial gallery?” And Iʼd say, “What else is it going to be?”ʼ Hence the name. ʻAlso, Amanda Rowell Gallery sounded terrible,ʼ she jokes.

In the early days, the gallery survived on ʻthe smell of an oily rag,ʼ she said several times. As she built up capital and an artist roster, The Commercial relocated from a tiny shopfront to a converted terrace house in the now gentrified inner Sydney suburb of Redfern, once hailed Australia’s ‘Black capital’. The Commercial moved west to its current premises in suburban Marrickville in 2018. But characteristically, itʼs no white cube. Rowell has opted for an exhibition space covered from floor to ceiling in polished concrete – quite a change after the close quarters of Redfern.

For as long as anyone can remember, almost without exception, the artist selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale has come from one of two galleries: either Rowell’s former employer Roslyn Oxley9 or Anna Schwartz Projects from Melbourne. That is, until Archie Moore, represented by The Commercial, broke this duopoly in 2024. Moore was among the first artists signed to the gallery when it was started in 2012. Rowell approached artists she knew would fulfill their creative potential, even if that was a long-term undertaking. The gallerist has always been in it for the long game – and her strategy has paid off.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore was operating in obscurity. He was precociously talented but a loner in Brisbane, which was then enthralled with proppaNOW, an Aboriginal artists’ collective which included founding member Richard Bell. When he joined the gallery, Moore was a seemingly shy, nervous artist who relished anonymity as the masked lead singer of an experimental punk noise band. What Archie Moore –still has in common with Bell and the artists of proppaNOW is that they make art that is strident and political, in contradistinction to the aesthetics and iconographic traditions of the Western Desert – a stylistic category which is regarded by some as the definitive Aboriginal art form. In 2024, he did something that no Australian artist had done in 60 years at the world’s oldest biennale. Installed in the monolithic, black-clad Australia Pavilion in the Giardini, just off the Grand Canal, Moore’s monumental installation work kith and kin (2024) won the Golden Lion for best national participation.

When I ask Amanda Rowell if she had a sense that Mooreʼs work – with its centerpiece of a vast genealogical chart stretching back more than 60,000 years – would win, she doesn’t answer my question directly. So I venture to say that kith and kin has everything one might want to see in a larger-than-life artwork. ʻIncluding Archieʼs deep intelligence and sense of fragility. And doubt,ʼ Rowell adds. The internal white cube of the Australia Pavilion disappeared under liters of blackboard paint, and over the course of several weeks, the artist and a small team of collaborators drew Moore’s real and speculative family tree in luminous white chalk. A reverential silence descended as visitors reckoned with the piece which climbed the walls, the common ancestors of all humankind unfurling in every direction.

If the upward trajectory of the Archie Moore’s career is anything to go by, Amanda Rowell is a dealer you want on your side. She is a gallerist who cares and she is evidently deeply invested in Mooreʼs work, characterized by its great subtlety, self-deprecating humor and bone-aching nostalgia. For me, the work he made for the Australian National Artistʼs Self-Portrait Prize in 2013 was the point at which Moore truly became the articulate, superb practitioner that he is today. The artist submitted a taxidermy dog of a snub-nosed mixed breed known to turn on its owners and small children. The stuffed animal’s fur wasn’tlustrous enough, so in a theatrical flourish, Moore applied black shoe polish to its coat. A reference to Moore’s own experience of depression and a term of racist abuse, Black Dog (2013) did not win the $50,000 prize but was purchased for the national collection. But before then Rowell played a supportive role in the workʼs realization. When the artist found the taxidermy dog offered for sale online in Sydney, Rowell obligingly drove to semi-rural Campbelltown on the city’s southwestern fringe to collect it and send it on to Moore.

Moore had not previously been represented by a commercial gallery when he signed up with The Commercial in 2012. Before he began working with Rowell, his career was inconsistent, but ever since, he has experienced consistent successes, clear signs of his growing fluency and skill as an established practitioner. As his confidence increased so did his maximal approach. In Archie Moore 1970–2018, his solo exhibition (and autoethnography) at Brisbane’s Griffith University Art Museum in 2018, the artist presented a series of rooms filled with visual, aural and olfactory mnemonic cues from his childhood. In this show, he drew the first public iteration of the ascendancy chart as featured in kith and kin at Venice. In another body of work, Les eaux d’Amoore (2015), the artist worked with a master perfumer to synthesize smells associated with his early life, to produce olfactory portraits of his absent white father, the lesbian sisterhood which centered around an aunt, as well as his first girlfriend. Moore’s practice is atypical in many ways: he does not work in a studio, partly because to a point, he works conceptually. However, as his work becomes ever more maximal, the stagecraft does too. 

Moore is intrepid in his collaborations, consistently daring to work in new ways.  We can see this in his latest creations for the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (curated by another former collaborator, Ellie Buttrose). Remnants Of My Father (2026) is a haunting multi-dimensional portrait of the artist’s father Stanley, whose fractured story is ‘told’ through a series of forged objects and reproduced documents from his estate. Commissioned by precious metals group Pallion, Moore says ʻthe work speaks to (false) hope, (empty) promises, (thin) veneers and (pipe) dreams.ʼ The objects range from the banal to the nostalgic, from a urine-filled bucket to a minerals exploration license rendered in 24-carat gold. A smaller, framed version of this evocative piece will premiere at Art Basel Hong Kong, says Rowell, whose PR skills ensured Moore’s new work received national coverage when it debuted in Adelaide recently. 

Amanda Rowell’s approach is hands-on. She is an assiduous judge of character and her knowledge of the artists she represents and their work is encyclopedic. Since 2012, she has mellowed: she no longer insists on being the artists’ sole representative gallery in Australia, finding exclusivity restrictive for all parties. Yet The Commercial feels much less ruthlessly competitive than other galleries in the same market. What’s more, The Commercial has cultivated something akin to street cred, a reputation for incubating talent and keeping it – for creating possibilities where none existed. 

As we wind up the interview, Rowell finishes on a gem of a backstory, which illustrates how a gallerist can invisibly pave the way for an artist, even help them make history. When Moore was selected as Australia’s representative artist for the Venice Biennale, he started an exchange with curator Ellie Buttrose. ʻIn the lead up to the deadline, I texted Ellie and said, “How are you going with the conversation with Archie?” And she said, “Oh, no, he said, No, he didn't have any ideas.” And I went, “Oh, really? Okay.” Then, I had a chat with Archie and I told him: “You know, you donʼt have to reinvent the wheel. You can build upon an existing idea.” Then I went back to Ellie and I said, “Ask him again.”ʼ